Outside A Time Without Memory: Dance Of Breath – Review

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Just like “a broken branch” and “outside a time without memory”, the poetry of Violeta Allmuça and her book “Dance of Breath” that was recently presented to the reader, follows a path that has no connection with other poets.

When and where does Allmuça’s poetry lives? It comes to me all of a sudden as an enormous question. Is a question presented to every writer. You can be alone in poetry, just like in a bus stop, train or while waiting like Godo. It’s possible. It’s possible… The struggle of men to remain alone and to create the world according to his personal life is a long history, which has descended in the Balkan Peninsula since the ancient times, at a time when Albanian language perhaps was awakening from a born consciousness. But it is not only the pretty language, which descends the poetry of this writer where, as she reiterates, every man, or only one man, “keeps the pillar of life near the heart, within the attractive roots.” These roots many be the blessed Albanian Language, our ancestors, and even death itself.

Therefore, the first element of Allmuça’s poetry remains the extent of breadth throughout an infinite space. This breadth from Albanian poetry takes me towards Serembe and De Rada, where at its best the world returns in a ruined past, gigantic and eternal. It is this spirit that extends everywhere, and even exceeds the instant, the energy of passing into another side walk, from being afraid that a car would run you over, and the alarm of an ambulance. In this poetry there are no opaque items, but a human language just like it is written once in for all. There should be a poet in order to read them.

So that, the poetry of Allmuça, just like today’s poetry in general, takes the shape of a stalactite or a fossil, this time not of the flora and fauna of once upon a time, of exterminated dinosaurs, but of the soul or humanity, as circulating as the wind, as insecure to find its place to stop. This soul, even though is withdrawn from the light absorbing lust, goes beyond that border, always without any support. Questions come one after one another. We are coming closer to the observation science of the most invisible items of ourselves and creation seems like a cold stubbornness. Do we need emotions and can there be emotions generated from these infinite voyages around and around those means that are expressed by Poetry?

There is no doubt that we are in the world of silence, and almost true in regards to the silence of this author. Her men has remained alone, detached, not a giant being neither small; just a being in a world where “the leaves of light are born blind.” This is why movement is born by itself, inside this great space, where we don’t give up to say at least based on scientific theories, that the world has had in its beginning perhaps ten dimensions. Poets are born to express these dimensions of fantasy and not of existence, which are not needed today even to apartment builders, neither to cemetery workers nor even less to those people who open roads or build the so called infrastructure.

Violeta Allmuça, with poetry and her static stature, even herself does not know how she has created movement and dimensions. But her light is born blind, exactly that light that make us see. The contrast, the surprise comes just like a rollover that brings down everything that is raised in this instant, while creating the great poetical movement. The poet perhaps is born to transmit this signs of breath which will not be seen in the verses and perhaps are simply some tracks. It is always said that reading of poetry is fainted and that these behavior don’t go towards the trend or the grounding mill where you are in line waiting to grind your life, from the shop where you buy bread up to the market of bananas or gas. Humans like deafness and solitude. But our social and natural laws, regardless of the new discoveries of material existence, increases or decreases of production, crises or worst than crises, don’t usually accept un-productivity. If we thought for a second that an entire nation will not have the ability to reproduce (a man that can load cargo), would step aside for a second because it would not be able to sell tomatoes or tomato sauce made by them. Everyone exempts himself from the full unproductively.

Then another question is born which ignores the walls of temporality. What would there be without poetry and continuous recreation of the word, what is world expected to see aside from disappeared dinosaurs, what is the world expected to see through the emptiness of creation? As we can see, a response comes through the poetry of Violeta Allmuça, moreover her all-heartedly efforts in all her poetry is a struggle to find a response to them. Therefore, in this complete solitude, where appears only one person in the whole world, everything, even this solitude is equally grandiose. In the world of the author, “the body is burned like smoke,” and dogs “are looking for the death of the other night”, but “the strings of grass are making love with the earth, under the moon’s veil.”

It is not a coincidence that Violeta’s poetry always has different sounds from one verse to the next. In the interest of this general solitude, a name, extracted from the childhood world, is looking around itself the part of freedom. In this space a sole man that is almost empty, appears once in a while a second man, sometimes as a skeleton and sometimes alive, in a world where it is very hard to find and understand the connections. The writer in her poem “Connection points” says: Me and you In a connection point Why don’t we connect Our hearts in that point Around the earthly tree We tie our shoes Through the paths of this world Me and you Run towards the back shadow Still don’t know What we will find But in this cold world, in her poetry are burned even the grass strings. In this sublime solitude and effort to lay in infinity with the other, is emerging in another pedestal, the same as mother Theresa, the figure of a nameless mother. She follows in the distance The devastated ship In forgiven dawns Blue butterflies and stars with the particles of life And cries for waves in the coast line Tide and un-tide scream when dropping salty tears Down below: over there in the light wall appears Ave Maria, and even further: the word colored with freedom crumbles the walls of the world / Ah, the live people are liberated only by love.

Only with the last verses, Violeta Allmuça would be entering in the Literature of Albania and the Balkans as well as far beyond. The author has discovered the written screams of world history while becoming just like the other fossils. There is no doubt that after such a personalized review, comes up another question, because the poet is almost not participating, and it is not even need to scream that it belongs to a feminine seed. This writer has the ability to turn the feminine seed into a neutral force. We as Albanians are not very much accustomed will all sorts of neutrality, even though we have lived always in the cross roads of marvelous and various world cultures. This kind of neutrality makes the poetry of Allmuça to not differentiate poems from one another. All poems stand together to create an entire landscape. You cannot tell who of those could take with himself a full life and to be a cover with its membrane. There are poets who create a world in itself with every poem, there are poets who create a world in itself separated and broken into reflection pieces, in order to say that the world and humanity is only one. The life of each one is like a fish living that is rotated from aquariums into the ocean. The writer is ending her newest volume of poetry “The Dance of Breath” with the poem “Body and Soul” where she does not remember a single love without love. Still, as she says in this infinity, lights are not lit in full. She describes a thirsty and never ending man who leaves his breath unbeknown to him while running endlessly.

This book is a bridge, where perhaps this breadth of Violeta Allmuça, a special Albanian writer, is relaxing after a few successful novels has gone back to her seeds of poetry.

*Natasha Lako, Albanian writer

Translated from Albanian language, by Peter M. Tase

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